It is now being reported that crucial information used to find and kill Bin Laden was obtained by Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, who was waterboarded during interrogation at Guantanamo Bay.
Although the CIA official does not say specifically that this specific intel came from the waterboarding sessions, he does imply that enhanced interrogation methods were used to obtain it.
If this is true*, and you are/were against waterboarding and/or “enhanced interrogation methods”, does this change your outlook? Do you still claim that it doesn’t result in any truthful intel?
This is the only article I could find with an actual quote from a US official regarding this, but there are several that hint at this direction.
If it were true - it wouldn’t change my point of view that torture is evil and more damaging to those who perform it than anything Bin Laden ever planned. I don’t believe I’ve ever claimed that it couldn’t possibly result in usable info but my objection to it is on moral grounds so that’s really beside the point, imo.
There were several arguments against waterboarding, but I don’t recall any that said all the intel garnered from the technique was false.
The two salient arguments I can recall were:
You could get actionable intelligence, but it would also be mixed in with a bunch of junk.
There are more efficient interrogation techniques. Retired intelligence and military interrogation officers have come out and repeated this and there are decades old US interrogation manuals that also back this up.
I can get apples off my tree by blasting them with a shotgun, but it’s probably a better idea to find a ladder.
Especially since the whole “ticking bomb” scenario (to think that that bullshit was the brainchild of the French army during the Algerian war, and it is still running around today is incredible to me. And not in a good way. End of rant) that is used all the time to justify torture would be out of the equation on this.
Did Ben Laden score any success on any other terrorist operation since september11?
I do not think anyone ever claimed torture never results in truthful information being given. It is just considered the worst possible way to obtain reliable intelligence in the military/law enforcement community. Napoleon even knew this and he’d be a guy who’d have your nuts in a vice in seconds if he thought it’d have been useful.
Nazis knew it too.
The problem with torture is the prisoner will say anything to make the torture stop. Whatever they think you want to hear they’ll say. The problem for the interrogators is deciding what parts are actually true and often they have no clue. IIRC there was a case in South America where Pinochet’s goons were torturing a woman for information. As it happened she spilled the beans almost immediately but they did not believe her and continued to torture her. Eventually (a week or two later) they realized the original info was the truth but by that time the info was useless and helped them not at all.
So no, this cannot be claimed as a victory for waterboarding even if we did gain that info via waterboarding.
Well, I guess, yes, but with regards to this particular case, which looks more and more like an actual “torture led to Bin Laden” rather than a hypothetical situation with unproven results.
It doesn’t much matter if it did; torture is unacceptable for any reason. Nor do I see any reason to believe that a bunch of people who have a history of lying are telling the truth this time.
That wouldn’t be a reasonable claim. The argument against torture (aside from the fact that it’s torture) is that you can get the in other ways that don’t have the same problems as torture. When you torture someone, they will tell you whatever they think you want to hear - which doesn’t mean that it’s all false, but that not all of it is reliable.
If the question is, was it worth it? I’d say the answer is a big no. I think we’ve made a lot of bad choices in responding to terrorism and the attacks of 9/11 and Gitmo is just one of them. Does a few bits of useful information , even leading to OBL’s death outweigh all the consequences of violating human rights? Hardly.
And while it is true that Khalid Shaikh Mohamed was tortured, there is no reason to believe that he gave up good information during that process, as opposed to giving good information when the torture was suspended and more effective techniques were emplolyed. The news article is little more than an exercise in post hoc, ergo propter hoc speculation.
No, torture was wrong before and it’s still wrong now.
And while I’ve argued in the past with many people on this board that torture can be effective, I have my doubts it was a factor in this case. I doubt Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, who’s been in custody since 2003, had any useful information about where Osama bin Laden was in 2011.
This sounds more like an attempt to justify waterboarding.
8 years? Suuuuure it did. I’m supposed to believe that 8 year old information supposedly gathered from a hopelessly contaminated source was important in locating someone now? Hardly. I wouldn’t find that plausible even if torture was effective.
So…we tortured KSM, he told us where the son of Ladin was, and it took us eight years to get around to finally doing something about it?
It ain’t exactly a ticking time bomb scenario, is it?
This is a fucking bullshit claim. People who love torture trying to claim that torture lead to Bin Ladin’s killing are lying fucks. And my proof is the 8 years between the torture and the operation. It’s proof that the torture was counterproductive.
And in fact, they didn’t much use torture to try to develop intelligence. They just tortured prisoners for fun. Yeah, for fun. You think they waterboarded the guy 187 times because on the 186th time he hadn’t said anything, but on the 187th time be sang like a canary? Read the docs. They tortured him in an effort to elicit, “learned helplessness”. That is, to teach him that the guards could torture him whenever they liked.
In other words, we tortured KSM. And 8 years later we had the Fukushima Nuclear disaster. You connect the dots.
Outside of his own statements, drawn under torture, is there any reason to believe that KSM was really some sort of major powerhouse in AlQ? That he ever knew anything?
